April 14, 2017

MacStories Weekly: Issue 75

In this issue: Noizio, iOS puzzle games (Vol. 1), Christopher Lawley’s Home screen, plus Ulysses workflows, Weekly Q&A, Tip, App Debuts, stickers, Links, and recap of MacStories articles.

As you might have seen on Twitter, we’ve been working on the next major addition to the MacStories family. If everything goes according to our plans and timeline, we should be ready to unveil this project next week.

I can’t share any more details yet – I like to prepare surprises for other people – but I wanted to stress how John and I (together with the help of Silvia and Alessandro) have been designing, planning, and building this for almost a year now. Whenever a big launch approaches, all the tiny details, decisions, and trade-offs converge with expectations and create pressure for everyone involved. It’s exhausting, but it’s also exhilarating at the same time, and we can’t wait to finish everything and get this out in the public. We’re almost there.

We’re going to have more details on this launch over the next few days. You can follow me and John on Twitter for the latest teasers and announcements. Stay tuned.

– Federico

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

Noizio

Noizio is an ambient noise maker that comes loaded with a wide variety of sound options so you can craft the perfect background noise to suit your mood and task.

The interface of Noizio is extremely simple. The app contains 15 different ambient sounds designed to imitate different locations and weather conditions. For locations there are options like ‘Coffee House,’ ‘Inside Train,’ and ‘On the Farm,’ while weather can range from ‘October Rain’ to ‘Winter Wind’ or ‘Sunny Day.’ Each option sounds great and makes it easy to set the mood you’re looking for.

One of the strengths of Noizio is its deep customization options. All of the ambient sound options can be played simultaneously with each other, creating a huge assortment of possible combinations. Each option also includes a volume slider that allows fine-tuning the sound levels to exactly what sounds best to you. So you could have ‘Campfire’ playing loudly, making the crackle of the fire stand out most, while quieter settings of ‘Summer Night’ and ‘River Stream’ are also playing. When you’ve found a combination that’s just right, you can save it for quick access later. Over time you can build up an assortment of presets you’ve saved for different occasions.

I use Noizio regularly when I’m writing, especially in cases where I’ve been stuck at my desk at home and want to create the illusion of a new atmosphere without the hassle of packing up and hitting a local coffee shop. For situations like this, one of my favorite sound combinations is ‘Coffee House’ paired with ‘October Rain’ and just a touch of ‘Thunderstorm.’ With the number of options in the app, you truly can create just about any environment you can imagine.

Noizio can be a great tool for simple relaxation purposes, for creating a focused work mindset, or just for creating the illusion of being in a new place. It is available on both iOS and macOS, but I use it almost exclusively on my iPad, where it includes Split View support and optimization for the 12.9" iPad Pro.

MACSTORIES COLLECTIONS

iOS Puzzle Games, Vol. 1

If you’ve read more than a handful of my Game Day reviews on MacStories, you probably get that my favorite type of iOS games is puzzle games. It’s a genre that works especially well on mobile devices from an interaction standpoint and because puzzles lend themselves to relatively short sessions. With the number of games on the App Store, it’s hard to believe that game developers are still coming up with new and interesting twists, but they are. Here are a some of my favorites.

Mini Metro

Mini Metro was one of a handful of games that made my list of Game Day favorites of 2016. The goal is to build a transportation system that gets passengers to their destinations on time. The premise is simple, but as your population grows you’re stuck dealing with the train tracks you laid down early in the game, which ramps up the difficulty level quickly. The game ends when you create a bottleneck that prevents you from handling the ever-increasing passenger load.

What makes Mini Metro special is its perfect balance of challenging gameplay, simple mobile-friendly mechanics, beautiful design, and fun sound effects. I noted in my original Game Day review that Mini Metro had quickly become one of my all-time favorite iOS games on par with Monument Valley and Alto’s Adventure. That still holds true today.

Since the original release, Mini Metro has continued to be developed with new cities’ train systems to build and an endless mode. If you missed this game when it was released, it’s one that should be at the top of your list, and if you haven’t played it in a while, take another look. The new cities and other features are worth a try.


Euclidean Lands

What do you get when you cross a Rubik’s Cube with Hitman GO? Something like Euclidean Lands. It’s a surprising mix of genres, but it works. You play as a hero on a cube with sides divided into grids. The game, which spans five chapters and 40 puzzles, is turn-based. You can rotate the cube and move your hero ahead one square at a time. Defeat all the enemies on the cube and reach an exit square to advance to the next level. The design and soundtrack are both top notch, but what sets Euclidean Lands apart is the 3D cube, which adds an element of surprise and strategy to the game that creates a unique perspective for players that is unlike other turn-based puzzle games I’ve tried. (Game Day review).


Human Resource Machine

Human Resource Machine debuted almost a year ago around the time of WWDC 2016, which is appropriate because its puzzles are effectively mini programming exercises. That may not sound like fun in the abstract, but framed as puzzles and setting it in a dystopian factory makes it work somehow. You play as a factory worker who has to move boxes coming off a conveyor belt to an outbox using various functions provided at the beginning of each stage like ‘jump’ and ‘copyto.’ You assemble little scripts from the functions in the sidebar and then tap Play to watch your worker carry out the instructions. Clear all the boxes and you move on to the next level. The puzzles get hard fast and you’ll find yourself thinking like a programmer as you try to create the right control flow to handle incoming boxes. (Game Day review).


Perchang

Perchang is a beautifully-designed physics puzzle game from the company of the same name. Using fans, magnets, flippers, and other gizmos, your job is to guide little balls into a goal before time runs out. There are two onscreen touch points that control in-game contraptions of the same colors, which affects the behavior of the balls. Each level’s set is stunningly-rendered in 3D that is mostly grey accented by the colors of the controllable contraptions. It’s an effect that adds personality and atmosphere to the game. If you like the old-school game Lemmings, which was published on multiple platforms for years, Perchang is a game you should try. (Game Day review).

TIPS

Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

Setting Up Night Shift on Your Mac

When macOS Sierra was updated to 10.12.4 at the end of last month it added Night Shift, a feature that changes the color of your display to reduce blue light and gives it a warmer, slightly orange cast. Night Shift is turned off by default. To turn it on, go to System Preferences and open Displays. Night Shift has its own tab with three setup options: ‘Off,’ ‘Custom,’ and ‘Sunset to Sunrise.’ Custom lets you set a range of times between which Night Shift will be activated, and Sunset to Sunrise uses your location to determine when the sun sets and rises to toggle Night Shift on and off. There is also a checkbox to manually turn Night Shift on until sunrise. Another way to quickly turn Night Shift on is with a two-finger downward swipe on a trackpad in Notification Center. System Preferences also includes a slider for setting the strength of the blue light filter, which gives you a preview of what the result will be as you drag it.

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Shortcuts Essentials

Automating Ulysses 2.8

Last week, the developers at Ulysses released version 2.8 of the popular text editor, which, among various improvements, brought a unification of the x-callback-URL API across the Mac and iOS. As a heavy user of the app (I’ve been writing almost everything in Ulysses for a year now), I immediately got to work and started playing around with the new automation features in the app.

With version 2.8, Ulysses automation is now effectively split in two approaches: there are some visual actions in Workflow that don’t require any understanding of URL schemes, and there are new commands that require implementing URL schemes by hand if you want to call them via Workflow. Obviously, you can mix and match built-in Ulysses visual actions with the new URL schemes for an even more powerful automation setup in Workflow.

Upon reading the updated docs on the Ulysses website, I came across a notable caveat. Some URL schemes in Ulysses 2.8 require users to pass an authentication token embedded in the URL scheme. Here’s how the developers describe it:

To protect the Ulysses library against access from malicious apps, actions that expose content or destructively change require the calling app to be authorized.

This token is generated on a per-app and per-device basis: if you’re the developer of an app that wants to integrate with Ulysses, each version of the app on multiple devices will have to store a token to authorize with Ulysses 2.8. When using built-in Ulysses actions, Workflow takes care of fetching the token from Ulysses the first time it’s authorized by the user; the token is then stored “invisibly” in the app, and automatically passed along with action parameters when executing a specific Ulysses action. But if you want to call the new Ulysses 2.8 URL schemes from Workflow manually, you’re on your own: there’s no way to access the token Ulysses has already granted to Workflow, and you’ll have to pass one manually.

Therefore, before considering dedicated workflows for the new APIs in version 2.8, I had to come up with a system to handle authorization easily and seamlessly for users. As you might imagine at this point, my solution – which I’ve been testing for the past week – involves running an Authorize Ulysses workflow as a function and storing a permanent token in a text file in iCloud Drive.

Authorize Ulysses

The workflow’s underlying concept is deceptively simple. The workflow checks for a text file with a specific file name in the /Workflow/ folder in iCloud Drive. If the file exists, the workflow reads the contents of the file – the token to include in the URL scheme. If the file doesn’t exist, Workflow authenticates with Ulysses, receives a token, and saves it as a file in iCloud Drive. By running this task as a function – a workflow called by another workflow – the app can check at runtime if a token is available, which suggests Workflow has already been authenticated by Ulysses. Any workflow that implements this function will work regardless of the current authentication status; it’ll work if there is an existing token, and it’ll work if there’s no token, too.

Under the hood, the workflow starts by checking for a text file in iCloud Drive. Because tokens are issued on each instance of the calling app, I used the ‘Get Device Details’ action to get the name of the device where Workflow is currently running. The device name is used to create separate tokens for Workflow on the iPhone and Workflow on the iPad, which should prevent issues with attempting to use the same token on multiple devices. With this system, each version of Workflow on each device gets its own token.

Using ‘Get Device Details’ to prepare different text files for each device.

To check if the text file with the token exists, the workflow attempts to get the file from iCloud Drive. With a ‘Count’ action, we count the number of files: if it’s 0, the text file doesn’t exist; if it’s 1, Workflow has found the text file in iCloud Drive. If the file exists, there’s nothing else the workflow needs to do besides reading the contents of the file and setting the token as final text output.

If there’s no text file, though, Workflow needs to authorize with Ulysses, get a token, and save it. To do this, we can call the ulysses://x-callback-url/authorize endpoint, passing along the name of our “custom app” (WorkflowMS) to receive a token. Instead of using the regular ‘Open URLs’ action, we need to use ‘Open X-Callback URL’ and put a ‘Wait to Return’ action after it. This way, Workflow will launch Ulysses and pause the workflow; Ulysses will then issue a token and relaunch Workflow, which will restart the workflow after the ‘Wait to Return’ action and, finally, save the token into the text file.

Note how, thanks to Magic Variables, we can easily fetch the output of the callback URL as ‘X-Callback Result’. In URL scheme lingo, this is the x-success parameter, which has been decoded by Workflow and extracted as text.

From now on, every time you want to automate Ulysses URL schemes that have no visual action counterpart in Workflow, I suggest installing this workflow to handle URL scheme authorization. Running this workflow inside other workflows as a function is easier than having to manually copy and paste a token every time, and it also makes it possible to share Ulysses workflows with other users while giving them an option to quickly generate and use their own tokens.

You can get the workflow here.

Export Multiple Ulysses Sheets at Once

Now for the fun stuff.

Among Ulysses’ new automation features, there’s an action to return information for all the sheets contained in a group. This action isn’t exposed natively in Workflow, and it needs to be put together manually with URL scheme authorization. I was intrigued by this action because it enables batch operations on multiple sheets at once through Workflow – something I’ve been thinking about in preparation for this year’s iOS 11 review.

To demonstrate the new x-callback-URL API in Ulysses 2.8 and showcase its integration with Workflow, I’ve created a workflow to fetch multiple sheets from a Ulysses group and export them to Dropbox. The Dropbox part is mostly a proof of concept: you can replace this action with whatever you prefer. I only wanted to provide a foundation for a system that can chain Ulysses and Workflow and perform actions on multiple sheets.

The workflow starts by running Authorize Ulysses as an external module; the token passed by the workflow is saved as a Magic Variable we can use in other actions. Then, we have the only ‘Text’ action you’ll have to configure yourself: the callback ID of the Ulysses group we want to automate. To fetch this identifier, you can open Ulysses, find a group, swipe left on it, and select More -> Share -> Copy Callback Identifier. This is a unique ID that can be used to reference a group of sheets from outside Ulysses.

Copying a group’s callback ID in Ulysses.

With the authorization token and group ID set, the workflow can now launch Ulysses with the ‘Open X-Callback URL’ action and read the information for a group passed by the app. Here’s my recommendation: because there’s going to be a lot of back and forth between Ulysses and Workflow using callbacks, in my experience it’s best to run this workflow in full-screen mode rather than Split View. I know that it’s not pretty to look at full-screen apps launching each other in rapid succession, but the animation in iOS 10 is better than in the old days of URL schemes, and I haven’t run into any bugs.

The first time Ulysses launches, it’ll see the ID and token passed by Workflow, and it will relaunch Workflow with text included in the x-success parameter. This text is a dictionary that represents the group in Ulysses, and the dictionary is not pretty.

Probably not your idea of “good-looking automation”. We’re going to hide this complexity.

Obviously, I wanted to present a nicer-looking list of sheets in the workflow. To do that, I iterated over every item in the sheets dictionary and assembled a new dictionary from scratch using the title of a sheet as key, and its ID as value. After some necessary reformatting to coerce Text into Dictionary, here’s what the list of sheets contained in a group looks like:

This is prettier.

At this point, we have a dictionary of sheets that, when presented as a list with the ‘Choose from List’ action, will output the ID of each sheet. To read the full-text contents of each sheet, we have to use a Repeat loop. For each sheet ID, Workflow will launch Ulysses with the native ‘Get Ulysses Sheet’ action and automatically return with an object that contains Magic Variables for the Ulysses sheet. Notice how we’re combining URL scheme actions with native Ulysses ones in Workflow, and how the ‘Get Ulysses Sheet’ action doesn’t need to be combined with ‘Get Details of Ulysses Sheet’ anymore because of Magic Variables. There’s some great flexibility at play here.

This Repeat loop will launch Ulysses multiple times for each sheet in a group.

This is where the “proof of concept” part of the workflow starts. When Ulysses re-launches Workflow to pass a sheet object, there are several Magic Variables to choose from:

  • Contents (sheet text)
  • Title
  • Identifier
  • Keywords
  • Notes
  • Name

If you want, you can extract each of these values for each sheet you’ve picked from the list. In my workflow, I went with a simple approach: each sheet is converted to a .txt file that is saved to a predefined Dropbox folder. This way, even if you use iCloud in Ulysses (like I do), you can quickly export multiple sheets as Markdown to Dropbox without having to compile them to a single text file or, worse, having to interact with a Dropbox interface for every sheet.

Just sit back and watch Workflow and Ulysses launch each other until everything’s done.

In practice, though, you can use this workflow as a framework to build anything you need for multi-sheet operations with Ulysses and Workflow. Maybe you want to find a string of text in each sheet and, if there’s a match, send that sheet somewhere else. Maybe you want to compress multiple sheets and share them as a .zip archive. As long as you follow the basic rules of actions inside a Repeat block, you’re free to customize this workflow for whatever suits you best.

I’m considering some of the other actions available in Ulysses 2.8, but I haven’t figured out how to implement them yet. For instance, it’s now possible to retrieve and update notes contained in a sheet, which could be interesting to keep an up-to-date set of comments for specific sheets. I have come up with a MacStories-specific workflow to archive and recreate sheets in a specific group, but it’s mostly based on the workflow I described above.

In general, I feel like Ulysses has turned into one of the premier examples of x-callback-url automation on iOS, and I hope others will follow their approach – that is, until Apple finally provides a better, safer, more powerful solution for everyone.

You can get the workflow here.

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SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Member Requests

Question: Is there a way to automatically add new tracks to an Apple Music playlist from a Spotify playlist? My friends keep a shared playlist on Spotify that is great, but I have my family plan on Apple Music. I would love an automated way to add the new tracks from this playlist to a playlist in Apple Music. (Gray, @grayharris)

There is no native way to monitor a Spotify playlist in the background on iOS and add new songs to Apple Music. However, because Spotify has an open web API, we can use Zapier to monitor a specific playlist and pass details for songs added to it using Pushover, which will trigger Workflow on iOS.

Here’s my idea: on Zapier, we can set up a trigger for ‘New Track Added to Playlist’. This trigger fires every time any song is added to a specific playlist from your account.

The song object contains a lot of metadata; most of those elements are meant to identify an item from the Spotify API, but we can extract attributes such as the song’s name, artist, and album and use them to construct a string of text we’ll pass to Workflow on iOS.

To send information from Zapier (cloud) to iOS (device), we can use Pushover as the middleman. Pushover is a notification service that can be hooked up to Zapier to send custom notifications to your iOS devices. These notifications can include a URL that will be automatically launched upon tapping the notification. As you can imagine, instead of attaching a traditional web URL to the notification, we’ll include the Workflow URL scheme with a command to run a workflow with some input text. The text will include the details of the song added to a Spotify playlist and caught by Zapier.

To include text in a URL, though, we need to encode it. And to do so, we have to add a Code (Python) step between the Zapier trigger and the Pushover action. This simple code will fetch song attributes, join them with a custom %%ITEM%% separator, and URL-encode them.

(You can copy the Python code from this gist.)

In the Pushover action, we can set up a custom message that describes the song that was added to a trigger, and we can paste the workflow:// URL to trigger a workflow on our iOS devices. As you can see, we’re using the Quoted Text variable (the output of the Code action) to embed encoded text in the URL scheme.

When a song is added to a Spotify playlist you’re monitoring, the zap will be triggered and you’ll get a Pushover notification. Upon tapping the alert, Workflow will open to run a workflow named ZapSpotify.

The workflow takes the input text, decodes it automatically, and then splits it at the custom separator we used – %%TEXT%%. This way, we have three items we can use to search for the same song on the iTunes Store: the song’s name, artist, and album. Before searching the iTunes Store, you’ll get an alert that confirms the song’s information and asks you to continue.

The ‘Search iTunes Store’ action will then search the iTunes Music Store for the song and artist passed by Zapier through Pushover. To make sure you’re dealing with the right song (and, say, not a cover or remix), I added a ‘Choose from List’ action, which will prompt you to manually pick an item. In theory, the most accurate result should always be first in the list. Finally, the song will be added to an Apple Music playlist of your choice.

From Zapier to Pushover to Workflow and the iTunes Store.

This isn’t the most elegant solution to bridge the gap between Spotify and Apple Music, but it works. In my experience, Zapier can monitor Spotify playlists for new songs without issues, and I’ve been using Pushover for a couple of years with great results. The process can’t be entirely automated – you’ll at least have to tap the notification to run the workflow – but this is as good as it gets.

You can get the workflow here.

Question: The Share My Week In Music workflow is featured in the gallery and my friend and I are trying to modify it to remove duplicate album artwork.

It currently finds the songs I played the most, takes their album artwork, and makes a grid from the artwork. We’re trying to find a way to make sure those album artworks are distinct. (Karan Varindani, @karan301_)

I struggled to put this together until I realized that there is an easy way to compare multiple files and check if the same one is repeated multiple times: we need to convert images to a text string.

The solution to this problem is encoding each image to a base64 string and using a Repeat loop to check if a variable already contains the same text string. Here’s the core of my modification to your workflow:

A loop begins for every album artwork fetched by Workflow. On each pass, the input image is encoded and a conditional block checks if a variable already contains it. On the first pass of the loop, this variable will be empty; on subsequent iterations, the variable – which is an array of items thanks to the ‘Add to Variable’ action – gets filled with unique base64 strings. This is possible thanks to the fact that the same image file always generates the same string when encoded, thus allowing us to check if the same image already exist in an array just by asking Workflow if the array contains a specific string of text.

At the end of the loop, we need to get the array and re-iterate over every item to decode it and save it in another array. This will be the variable that, when fed to ‘Combine Images,’ will generate a grid of artworks you can share.

The final grid without duplicate album artworks.

With this system, each album artwork on the grid will be unique, and you might want to consider extending the range of items that are searched by Workflow to fetch even more artwork because all of them will be different on the final image.

You can get the modified workflow here.

And now, an interesting workflow shared by member Brent:

Brent: Recently I wrote about how to backup and restore your Workflows. I have a variation of that workflow that I use for saving individual workflows. These might be workflows I created for others on Reddit or for my friends, but not ones I actually use myself.

The workflow starts with creating two folders in iCloud Drive stored at Workflow/Backups/Individuals. If these folders exist already, then nothing happens. The workflow will then ask you a couple questions. Do you want to backup or restore? And do you want to save/restore from all your workflows or just one?

Also, I want to thank Reddit user rawbytz who directed me to this workflow, which is the basis for the restore part of my workflow. If you want the new and improved Backup/Restore Workflow you can get it here. (Brent Clarj, @brentacPrime)

And finally, another workflow submitted by member Toph:

Toph: I’m trying to maintain parity in my Apple Music and Spotify libraries this year and I made some additions and modifications to a Songlink workflow previously posted on MacStories Weekly.

Some benefits of this version:

  • It accepts links from either Apple Music or Spotify.
  • It can be run from the Today widget or the share sheet for either service. To do this, it calls another workflow, attached, called “Single URL from Input or Clipboard,” which looks for a URL in the Workflow’s input, and if none is present, looks for one in the clipboard.
  • Using the Songlink API, the user can copy the link to their clipboard, open it in Safari, Apple Music, or iTunes, and can also share via any other service.
  • The two most recent options I added, “Open in Spotify” and “Open in Apple Music,” fetch the Songlink page and open the enclosed URLs matching “spotify” and “itunes” respectively.

I thought you might enjoy the sheer level of nerdiness that went into this.

You can get the workflows here:

(Toph, @toph)

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WEEKLY Q&A

Your weekly correspondence with the MacStories team.

Question: Is it possible to use Launch Center Pro or Workflow to open two apps in Split View with one tap? (Andre)

Unfortunately, Andre, it is not possible for an app on iOS to launch two apps in Split View simultaneously. There is no API for developers to launch multiple apps in multitasking.

Question: I am a lawyer in the UK. I have two templates in Word 2016 for Mac that I use all the time and I would like to be liberated from Word. I would love to use MultiMarkdown so I could focus on my text and the content and not have to think about the way it looks, formatting, etc.

Is there a way where I can make a template to my specification and define how the headings, footnotes, and other elements look and are positioned so that I know my content is presented as it needs to be and I can just do my work? For example, if I am preparing a court document, there has to be a certain top heading part and footnotes have to be in a certain fashion. I also use the Equity font, which does not come with the system or Office.

I would like to be able to use this template in macOS on my MacBook Pro (2014) and in iOS on my iPad Pro (9.7 inch). What editor or editors would you recommend on both platforms that could do MMD and apply my own template? (Nicholas Barnes, @macgeekwig)

This is a complex question and I’m not sure what the best solution would be. Custom fonts can be installed on iOS using AnyFont, but a text editor that supports templates – Editorial – doesn’t load custom fonts using the native font picker of iOS. I’m not aware of other text editors that integrate with MultiMarkdown and can create templates for new documents with a specific font.

My only idea would be to create a template in Editorial and write a custom preview file that exports a document to HTML using a custom CSS with the Equity font loaded over the Internet – though that would require a bit of setup on your end. If anyone has other ideas for templates with custom fonts on a per-document basis, I’d love to know.

Question: What’s the best app to record an iPhone’s screen? I now have to connect to my MacBook and use QuickTime. (Dominic, @ddiiiik)

QuickTime continues to be the only option we have for native screen recording on iOS. Any other solution that is launched on the App Store is a workaround and eventually gets pulled by Apple because there’s no official API to start a screen recording task on iOS devices. Hopefully, the ability to record a device’s screen will be added in the future as iOS becomes a primary computer for millions of users.

Submit your own question

THE ALBUM

We love stickers in iMessage, and here we'll share some of our favorites.

Pop Art Collection

A comprehensive set of witty, quirky stickers with fluorescent colors and unique, consistent style. Some of the best $2 I’ve spent on the iMessage App Store lately.

Food Porn Emoji

This collection of beautifully-photographed, mouth-watering food from former Top Chef star Fabio Viviani includes everything from sweets and burgers to pizza and beer.

Electric Crazyland

These wildly colored stickers were recently featured in a television ad by Apple. The neon animated images of creatures, a gorilla, and more are impossible to miss in a conversation.

Lovely Monsters

Lovely Monsters is a big set of little monsters designed to help you get your point across without dominating your conversation.

Say It With Helvetica

Who said the Helvetica craze is over? This classic font is an excellent way to get your message across clearly.

Rikcat

Bizarre can be fun too. There’s something here for almost any situation with these tricolor stickers that include gadgets, creatures, an eyeball, and food.

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Taskmator

Taskmator is a full-featured TaskPaper client for todo lists based on plain text. The app has recently received an update with support for the new Dropbox API, a new icon, the San Francisco font, and a variety of bug fixes for iOS 10. I don’t use TaskPaper for my lists, but if you’re into that kind of system, I’d recommend checking out Taskmator.


Progress

This app lets you track your weight over time with a series of visualizations. There’s a graph that highlights weight loss or gain with a summary at the top, but you can also compare before/after photos and overlay statistics on top of the side-by-side comparison. Like other weight utilities, Progress integrates with HealthKit and supports Touch ID.


Unitrans

We first mentioned Unitrans when the iMessage App Store launched last year, and the app received a major update last month with a complete redesign, support for more languages, and an In-App Purchase to unlock more features. Unitrans still allows you to send messages in other languages directly from iMessage, but it looks much better than the first version.


Vanido

Want to learn how to sing properly but don’t have time for lessons? Vanido is a singing coach that lives on your iPhone and helps you get better at singing with real-time visual feedback. The app offers a variety of vocal exercises and can visualize your vocal range and pitch as you sing. Vanido has been created in collaboration with vocal coaches and its unique visual pitch detection looks like a great way to take advantage of the iPhone’s hardware.


Runtasty

The fitness app maker Runtastic has launched a food app with over 40 healthy recipes. According to the company, the app showcases dietitian-approved recipes for all diets and dietary restrictions (such as gluten-free and dairy-free), which are accompanied by videos to make it easier to follow instructions. The App Store product page is making me hungry already.


Sonic

Earlier this week, I had the terrible idea of taking a shower while listening to a podcast on my iPhone 7 Plus. Despite its water-resistant abilities, some water drops caused the speaker to start producing muffled, low-volume sounds. After some research, I came across this Reddit thread, which suggested using Sonic to make the speaker emit a specific frequency that would eject water from the speaker grill – kind of like watchOS 3 can do by default. Indeed, after a few minutes of playing a 165 Hz frequency with Sonic, my iPhone was back to normal. I should probably research waterproof Bluetooth speakers now.


Teeter

Jake reviewed Teeter last summer. It’s a tricky balancing puzzle with great physics. The goal is to carefully raise a platform while balancing a ball past obstacles. You can only raise the ends of the platform a little bit at a time or the ball will pick up momentum and roll off the end. This week, Teeter added 30 new levels (bringing the total to 150), haptic feedback for supported iPhones, and new obstacles, refreshing one of 2016’s stand-out puzzle games.


Pixel Drifters

Pixel Drifters is incredibly difficult and loads of fun. The goal is to collect as many coins as possible before crashing your pixelated car. To steer your car, you swipe left and right across the screen, which starts your car drifting immediately. You can remove ads and buy additional cars with an In-App Purchase, but there is plenty of fun to be had with the free version of Pixel Drifters.


SmartGym

SmartGym has joined the ranks of workout apps that have added SiriKit support on the Apple Watch. SmartGym walks you through your gym routines with illustrated exercises. The app also tracks your past workouts and body measurements. With this update, you can now start a workout from an Apple Watch, which is convenient if you don’t want to pull out your phone in the gym. The Watch app has also been redesigned to reduce the number of taps and swipes while you’re working out.


Finances

We covered Finances for iOS in Issue 70 of MacStories Weekly and this week, developer Matthias Hochgatterer released a macOS version of the app. Like its iOS counterpart, Finances for macOS uses a unique variant of the double-entry bookkeeping system. The app can handle multiple currencies, attachments, is Touch ID-enabled, and compiles statistics that give you an overview of your financial picture. Finances also syncs between the Mac and iOS versions, making it a complete solution for your bookkeeping needs across all of Apple’s computing platforms.

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Anticipating iOS 11

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HOME SCREENS

Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

Christopher Lawley

Twitter: @chris_lawley. Website: The Untitled Site.

For the last couple of months, I have been challenging myself to work only off my iPad. This includes everything from email to editing videos. In order to do that I needed to rework the Home screen on my iPad Pro 12.9-inch, and what I came up with works for me and my workflow.

I knew I needed to have just one page of apps because I end up spending more time trying to find an app I rarely use instead of using Spotlight search. I also like the look of the empty row of icons, but that’s just a personal aesthetic choice with no significant productivity boost.

Airmail: I really dislike email, but honestly who doesn’t? Airmail helps me get through my mail quicker than any app I have used before because of its action list. This app has a seemingly endless variety of options, and I have yet to find an email-related task this app can’t help me with.

Fantastical: Fantastical has been my go-to calendar app for what feels like forever. Natural language input is such a big deal for me. This makes it incredibly easy to quickly add an entry so I’m not standing there taking up someone’s time trying to save something to my calendar. After iOS 6, every time you tapped an address in iOS it would open in Apple Maps. Fantastical gave me the ability to change that, so now I can tap an address and it opens in Google Maps.

1Writer: 1Writer is the Markdown text editor I have been using since I started doing work on my iPad over a year and half ago. This app has been kept up to date and I haven’t had any issues with it. It supports Dropbox sync and works very much like nvALT on the Mac. If you’re looking for a reliable text editor, I highly recommend it.

Editorial: Now that Editorial supports Split View I have been using it a lot more. It’s much more powerful than 1Writer as a text editor, and I’m just starting to scratch the surface of it. I’m worried that it might not be kept up to date, as past evidence suggests, so I’m keeping 1Writer around just in case. But I’m excited about this app and seem to learn something new about it every time I use it.

Trello: For the last five months or so I have been getting back into making videos. I jump around from project to project, and I noticed I was forgetting about whole videos. Up until recently I didn’t have a place to remind me of where I was with those projects. This is where Trello comes in. Trello has been very successful in keeping me up to date with my projects. Even though this app is geared toward teams, it has been very helpful for my solo projects, too.

Due: Due is my timer app. I use this to remind me to do the dishes at a certain time, or track when laundry will be done, or remind me to take out the trash when I am leaving for work in the morning. I have a bunch of repeating tasks that I don’t want living in my task manager, and Due is perfect for that – especially with its feature to nag you if you don’t address your task.

LumaFusion: I have been making videos for over fifteen years, and have used Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and a lot of others. LumaFusion is the app that has allowed me to work completely off my iPad. This is a multitrack video editor, and the only one that I have found on the App Store that works for me. The app supports three video tracks and up to six audio tracks. I’m really impressed by this app, but I just wish it had a better icon. If I can shamelessly plug something, I made a tutorial video for this app I am proud of. If you are a video editor and work from your iPad, I recommend you check out LumaFusion.

Notability: With Notability and the Apple Pencil in hand, this is easily the best way I have ever worked on video scripts. Being able to mark a script up and then use Split View to fix it in my text editor is so fast and productive. I also use this app when recording voice-overs to view my script with any notes I have made.

Dropbox: Managing files on iOS has always felt a bit weird. For a lot of people, cloud services like Dropbox fixed that. Everything for me lives in Dropbox, from personal documents to the footage I’m currently editing. I would be lost without Dropbox.

1Password: Everyone should use a password manager. I’m not sure I would be able to get work done without one. It’s super important to keep your passwords safe, and 1Password has always done that for me.

Instapaper: Instapaper has been a great service for many years. It’s great to store articles in, and I also use it for bookmarking things like apps I want to check out, products I want to order, or links for things I’m researching for a project. I know it’s not what the service is intended for, but it’s convenient to have links to everything in one spot.

Tweetbot: I have always used a third-party Twitter client, and Tweetbot is the current one I like using. My favorite feature is timeline syncing between my iPhone and iPad. If you haven’t looked at this app yet, I recommend you check it out.

Messages: Messages is how I keep in touch with everyone. There’s not really anything special about how I use it – it’s just a great app.

Music: I have ADHD and I can’t really focus when I have a bunch of noise going on around me. I have one Apple Music playlist that has all the Mass Effect music in it. I use this playlist as I’m working and it just fades into the background; I forget it’s even playing. Check it out if you have a hard time focusing like me.

Overcast: While I may not listen to a lot of music, I listen to a ton of podcasts. Overcast’s Smart Speed feature is a lifesaver for somebody like me who wants to listen to more podcasts than what I have time for. The new queueing feature in Overcast 3.0 is really smart and quite handy.

The Dock

The dock on all of my iOS devices is pretty much the same apps: Safari, Todoist, and Bear. On my iPad I have one folder there, and this is how I can fit 100+ apps on one page. I mostly forget that this folder is there, and if I need an app I will use Spotlight search to find it.

Safari: I really like Safari – I think it might be the best built-in app on iOS. Features like being able to see what tabs are open on other devices are super helpful. I do use iCab for the crazy tasks I need done on the web, but I seem to be relying on that less and less.

Todoist: I’m sort of new to Todoist. I got an Amazon Echo for Christmas and I wanted to be able to add things to my task manager through it. I knew I could do this with Todoist. Not only can I add tasks to my inbox in Todoist using my voice, but I can also add things I need to pick up at the store to a separate list the same way. I’m excited to keep using Todoist and see what else I can unlock with it.

Bear: When iOS 9 came out I fell in love with Apple Notes, and I didn’t think there could be anything that would replace that for me – then Bear came along. With themes, tagging, Spotlight search, and most importantly Markdown support, I switched in a heartbeat. I don’t just use Bear to jot down quick notes, I also use it to start all my scripts with an outline and any links I might need to reference. I really love this app.

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